New Directions

Will Obama’s Health Care Plans Be a Casualty of the Economy?

Pretty much all of the civilized countries of the world have some sort of national health care program. The major exception is the United States. Other than those older people who qualify for Medicare, everyone else is pretty much on their own to find their own solution to health care. It seems that, for the most part, the people who are opposed to national health care are Republicans. These people generally like the idea of either private health insurance, or if they are very wealthy, they just insure themselves – which is probably the most cost effective way to go if you can afford the risk. After all, the insurance companies play that game all the time, and they do pretty well. Just take a look in almost any major city and you’ll see that many of the largest buildings and skyscrapers are owned either by banks or insurance companies. There is a lot of money to be made in interest and in insurance.

So, for the Republicans, it is pretty much a money issue, although they claim (like John McCain) that America’s private health care system is the best in the world. The problem is that while the Mayo Clinic and a couple of other hospitals might be competitors for the title of best in the world, the average U.S. hospital is not a contender. According to the last ranking of the world’s health care systems by the World Health Organization, the U.S. ranks number 37 in the world in health care, just below Costa Rica and just above Slovenia. France is number 1, in case you are interested. This is why you occasionally hear of some rich, Arab sheik going to the Mayo Clinic for a rare operation, but you never hear of a rich sheik going to St Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City for a rare operation, do you? You also never hear about all the rich sheiks who go to France or England or Norway for their operations either, do you? The problem for ordinary Americans is that 99% of the American people don’t use the Mayo Clinic, they have to use their local health care providers and these are only slightly better than those in Slovenia, acording to the WHO.

So, how did we get this way? Why don’t we have a better health care system? It’s because our health care system is not a system at all – it is a free for all, for-profit business where health care is provided where it can generate the most profit. Where there is little money to be made there is little health care available. Imagine if all of our schools were private. Where would they be? They would be in all the rich towns and cities, and in those towns and cities they would be in the rich neighborhoods.

However, for some reason, the U.S. has always felt that the government should provide education (but not health care) for its citizens and the result is we have a vast system of public schools throughout the country. Where there are more people there are more schools – there is not a strong correlation between the number of public schools in an area and the amount of per capita income. However, it is true that wealthy towns do have more money to spend on their local schools and so there are differences in the quality of schools across the country. This is not something to be proud of, nor should we believe that this is in any way beneficial to the country as a whole. It is simply a defect in our system.

Nevertheless, the defect in our health care system is far more grievous. The majority of Americans pay for medical insurance through their employer-based plans. A national, government operated health insurance plan would work equally well; however, it would undoubtedly be opposed by the for-profit health insurance companies. Remember, these are “for-profit” and they make big profits. Why would they ever want to give that up? These companies and their paid lobbyists will always strongly oppose a national health insurance plan. They don’t care that Costa Rica has better health care than we do. They care only about their profits. The statistics don’t lie, the U.S. health care system is one of the worst in the civilized world – not the best as John McCain always claimed during his campaign. If you have never seen Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko”, go and rent the DVD. You’ll see what I mean.

The difference between health systems like Canada’s or Norway’s or France’s and ours is that ours is an uncontrolled, unplanned, haphazard conglomeration of medical capabilities that are distributed according to wherever the greatest profit can be made. The civilized countries of the world plan their health care. The government makes sure hospitals are built where they are needed and that the same standard of health care is provided everywhere. In the civilized world health care is a right that all citizens enjoy – just like education. In the civilized world private health insurance companies are not necessary and health care therefore costs less – the profit making middlemen are eliminated.

The real choice we face is this: should we actually plan and create a health care system that provides high quality care for all citizens or should we continue in our false belief that the marketplace is like a giant computer that always provides the optimal answer? We have already seen how the uncontrolled marketplace can cause a worldwide financial catastrophe. Why do some of us, mostly Republicans, still cling to the false belief that chaotic, uncontrolled systems work better than carefully planned systems? I suppose it’s because they have found ways to personally profit from such chaotic systems, but such systems don’t benefit the economy of a country, they don’t benefit the education systems of a country, and they don’t benefit the health-care of a country.

Barack Obama has promised to change our health-care system. The change we need is intelligent change – planned change – controlled change. We need to study the best health-care systems in the civilized world and emulate their strategies for success. It’s not rocket science – remember, even Costa Rica does better than our chaotic system. We just need to get past the self-serving Republicans in Congress, like John McCain, who don’t care a lot about the average American or his health, because you can be very sure the first thing they will cry out is, “Oh, in these harsh economic times, we can’t afford a national health care program”.

The truth is the American people can’t afford the chaotic, for-profit, third-world type of health care system we have now.

Like this:

Related

One Response

The corner stone of competent healthcare is good diagnostics. To help pay for his plan Obama has recommended a 95% utilization rate for Medicare reimbursement of Diagnostic Imaging. This would make it all but impossible for outpatient Diagnostic Imaging centers to remain open, and result in thousands of lost jobs. It would force hospitals to try to pick up the slack. This is one of the major ways that healthcare will be rationed and the quality of healthcare seriously downgraded.

Follow My Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 22 other followers

Visitor Count

144,294 hits

The Viral Epiphany

My new book, a thriller about a deadly worldwide pandemic caused by cloning an extinct virus is available as a digital download for Kindle readers at Amazon.com. Guaranteed to make you think. Click on the cover image to go to the Amazon download page.